Why I Wanted to Leave
by they'recomingtotakemeaway
Summary: What terrible thing could have happened that JJ couldn't stand to be in the BAU anymore?  JJ goes home one day to find something so horrible that even she couldn't predict it. Written for the-vampire-act and hudson911's CM Ladies Contest.


**Behold my entry for The-Vampire-Act and Hudson911's Criminal Minds Ladies Contest! Even if it's so different that I'm not even sure it should count… In fact it's quite different from anything else I've written. Well, I hope you enjoy! Oh, and this is only the third entry! Start entering people!**

* * *

JJ would never admit it, but she was terribly exhausted with her job and her home life. She worked fourteen hour days and came home just wanting to crash. Will would always be there saying that she needed to spend more time with her family, with him. With this in mind, she left work a few hours early after a particularly long case to go spend some time with him and get a bit of sleep. JJ brought some paperwork home in case she felt like getting up extra early to get some stuff done.

When she got home she was utterly soaked in rain, and the power was out from the thunderstorm. Nevertheless she was glad to be there. "Honey, I'm home!"

There was a deep guttural shriek, like a wolf being hit by a car. Even though the noise sounded anything but human, JJ immediately recognized it as her husband's.

"Will!" It was pitch black in the house. She took her gun out as well as a flashlight, cursing the bad weather.

"No, please. Don't. I know you're not a bad guy. Come on. You don't want to kill someone! Please!" Will's voice rang from the second floor. JJ registered the excruciating pain in his voice.

JJ had made her way up the stairs, about to kick down the door to their bedroom when she heard a second voice -the attacker's.

"It's okay. Trust me. It's better this way. You won't have to hurt anymore. It'll be better for everyone. Think about JJ. She'll be so much happier. Do it for her."

JJ was now frozen entirely, unable to move. It wasn't that she wasn't prepared for a situation like this, it was the voice. The oh-so-familiar voice that she had heard every day for years. The one voice that belonged to the one person she couldn't imagine hurting anyone.

* * *

She kicked down the door. How did Morgan always do that with such ease? JJ felt like she had just been hit by a train. She dropped the flashlight and held her gun with both hands.

"Spence?"

"JJ?" A stunned sounding Spencer Reid said. With the help of the lantern he had brought, JJ could clearly see his khaki pants and sweater-vest were splattered with blood. His gloved hands held a knife in a death grip.

As for her husband, she didn't even want to think about it. If Reid had a sprinkle of blood on him, then Will had buckets. But he was clearly still alive, shaking and saying, "JJ, run. Now..."

But Reid wasn't focused on JJ. He turned to Will and brought down the knife close to his chest. "I'm sorry you had to see this, Jayje."

"You don't have to do this, Spence. I don't want to shoot you, but I will if you bring that knife any closer to Will," JJ said, getting her bearings on the situation.

"It's no use, JJ. I broke his rib cage. I cut into his chest and severed some very serious arteries. Either he can die a slow and pain death, or I can finish him off now. It would be quick. He wouldn't feel any pain," Reid said.

The gun was shaking in JJ's hands now. She was for the first time realizing what all the blood covering her husband was from. His ribcage was broken in half and the left side was moved just enough that Reid could reach below to the organs and arteries underneath. He was trying to cut out her husband's heart.

No, not trying. Not anymore. Reid was cutting out the heart as she stared dumbly, unable to move. He was probably right. It was probably better for Will to die quickly instead of having to live just to feel nothing but searing pain for another measly ten minutes before he kicked off. JJ tried to think, to take the next logical step.

"Where's Henry?" JJ asked, suddenly filled with a new panic. She might be too late to save Will, but she had to worry about her son now.

"He's at the babysitters. I wouldn't come to your house and kill your husband if your son was here, JJ," Reid said, as if she had asked him the most obvious question in the world and he was the one being reasonable.

JJ breathed a sigh of relief. But she didn't get too comfortable. Spencer had at this point, not only finished Will off, but had successfully removed his heart from his body. Reid was tossing it back and forth from hand to hand, still holding the knife.

"Why did you do this, Reid?" JJ asked.

"Reid? Go back to calling me Spence. I like it better..."

"Fine. Why did you do it, Spence?" JJ said, gun still at the ready.

He finally let go of the heart, resting it on the nightstand carefully. The look on his face seemed to be one of quiet adoration. He looked like a man tucking in his child to sleep. "Because I love you, Jennifer. We can be together now. I thought that's what you wanted."

"How, Spence? How are we going to do that when Will is lying there murdered with no one to point to but you or me?" JJ asked. She was stalling for time, giving him anything she thought he wanted.

"You shouldn't have come," He said quietly. "I had it all worked out, Jayje! Well, it'll be okay. We'll just... We'll..." He wandered around the room hitting himself in the head repeatedly, knife still in hand. "No! I'll leave right now. You'll call the police right away and tell them that you just came home to find your husband dead. Okay?"

"I need you to put the knife down, okay?" JJ asked.

Reid looked shocked. "You're going to arrest me."

"I have to, Spence. You know I love you, but look at you! You're covered in my husband's blood from tearing his heart out! There's just no other way," JJ said.

"There is another way," Reid said, sitting on top of JJ and Will's marriage bed. "JJ, I don't want to go to prison."

She knew all too well what he was saying. She thought about it for only a minute before deciding. "Get up." He put the knife down on the bed and stood up. "No. Grip the knife tight in your hand. Come closer, like you're about to attack me."

Spencer obliged. "I love you, Jennifer."

"I love you, too, Spence," JJ said, providing Spencer with just a second of solace before blowing his brains out.

* * *

It was a joint funeral, if you could believe it. A man and his murderer, coffins side-by-side. But under the circumstances it seemed to make sense. There was a large overlap between the attending parties and no one seemed to blame Reid for flying off the handle. Everyone seemed to be of the opinion that he wasn't responsible for his actions, that he was in a fragile mental condition and that they should have saw it sooner and helped him. JJ was thankful for that.

She was crying considerably as the Eulogist went on and on about how death could come for even the young and that we should cherish the life we have while it lasts. Everyone assumed that it was Will she was crying for, but they would be wrong. All that was going through her head was Reid and how she would never see him again. How no one knew it was all her fault.

Not that she regretted pulling the trigger. Spencer would never survive a day in a prison. And as for his plan? As much as she would have liked to, she knew the BAU would have taken a personal interest in the case, and by God they would have solved it. It wouldn't have taken them long to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

She didn't regret the affair, either. There was nothing she wanted more than to be with Reid. But he had been too slow, and Will had caught her and impregnated her first. She had never been really happy with their relationship, knowing it would always be second best. She had liked him -not loved him, but liked him- so she stayed around. And with a baby on the way she felt like she had no choice to marry him and watch the shocked voice on Spencer's face when he found out. No choice but to hold back tears when he choked out a nervous, "Congratulations."

The affair had started soon after that. They pulled each other into closets, bathroom stalls, backs of cars, cheap motels. Anywhere where they thought they could get away with it. Every time they made love it had all the intensity as if it were the last time. JJ loved everything about it. The awkward nibbling at her chest, the hands that touched her gently, and the way his hips felt against hers. The feel of him inside her and the way he moaned when he came.

What JJ did regret was the things she said to Spencer. All the time. Sitting on the park bench, eating ice cream and pretending to be a proper couple. "If I didn't have a husband, dear you'd be the one and only candidate." In the bathroom stall of some too loud club. "Oh, God Spence. If only it weren't for Will. I wish I never met him. I really do." On the back seat of his Volvo in some desolate parking lot. "If he wasn't in the picture Spence, we wouldn't have to hide. We could just be together day and night and we wouldn't have to hide anymore."

She sat there thinking about it and how maybe Reid would never have attempted something so violent had she not pushed him in that direction. And hadn't some small part of her wanted that? Not for her Spencer to kill Will and end up dead himself, but for something to take her husband away from her. Maybe some mysterious illness that allowed him to die peacefully in his sleep. No, she hadn't wanted Will to die. No matter how much she had ended up resenting him. She may have wished she never met him and she certainly wished she wasn't with him, but death was too extreme. There was no way he deserved what he got.

The funeral wrapped up, and JJ threw the first shovel of soil onto her husband's grave. There was no one to do the same for Spencer. Maybe his mother would have, had she been there, but after hearing the news she had relapsed into one of the least lucid periods she had had in years. JJ had thought that maybe Hotch or Morgan would have done it, but apparently neither of them wanted to. It was probably bad for FBI appearance to take part in such a symbolic act for a murderer.

Hotch approached JJ after the funeral. "I'm so sorry."

JJ nodded apathetically. "Me too." They stood together in some kind of comatose silence that felt just a little bit like company.

"I got your resignation," Hotch said. "Are you sure?"

She laughed bitterly and inwardly kicked herself for it. "I'm sure. You don't honestly think I could go back to work after that? That I could look at case file after case file of brutal, horrible crimes, and just see Will and Spencer?"

"No, I guess not," Hotch replied. "I know you loved him. I know what went on between you two. I just want you to know that it isn't your fault. Reid wasn't well. It was just something terrible that happened and wasn't anyone's fault." Hotch put a hand on her shoulder. Surprisingly, it was sort of comforting. "It's a shame how everything worked out."

"I know," JJ said, dabbing at tears with a Kleenex. "What if he wasn't sick? What if he had this plan to take us away and I never listened? What if I just kept telling him the only thing that stood between us was Will?" She looked Hotch directly in the eye and asked the question that she feared the most. "What if he was an honest to God, cold-blooded killer that had been planning this for months and I was too blind to see it?"

"JJ... None of us saw this coming. Why don't you just try to remember him for who he was when you loved him? Before he ever got that idea in his head," Hotch said.

She nodded and watched Hotch walk away, knowing it would be the last time she saw him. She tried to take it all in, the way he moved, the way he talked, the ever-serious expression on his face that made him look like his life was one never-ending funeral. JJ would miss that about him.

She waited for the crowd to thin out by her husband's grave until the last person came and gave her their condolences. Then JJ wandered away from Will's grave to Spencer's. (Spencer's was in a different row, it seemed they had enough sense to not put the murderer in the same row as his victim.)

JJ knelt down by the grave and threw something down into the hole, watching it fall onto the coffin. She spoke to him, in a tiny whisper. "Spencer, I loved you more than you could possibly know. I should have left him. We should have been together. I… I just want you to know I forgive you. And that I miss you so much it hurts. I don't know how I'm going to live without you."

She stayed there in silence for a while, maybe for minutes, maybe for hours. How could someone tell the time when the only person they ever loved was dead and gone? Reid has slid through her fingertips before she ever had a chance to truly grasp him. And now all JJ could think about was how she should have had quicker reflexes, she should have grabbed onto him and held him forever. The one thing she regretted most was not being there for Spencer, and only Spencer.

Finally, JJ got up the courage to walk away. At least literally. She realized she would never have the courage to walk away emotionally.

The only company Reid got from then on was the paper heart JJ had dropped on his coffin that read: _I belong to you. _That was okay. JJ knew that was where her real heart was, with Spencer, and _she _was the piece of paper –something flimsy and insubstantial with nothing to protect her from the misery the world had to offer.

* * *

**A/N: Did I even write this? Mentions of het sex, taking the side of a cheater, Reid loving anyone but Morgan? Assisted suicide? Reid **_**dying**_**?**

**To make a long story short, I normally hate all of the above things. But I wrote them all, and I loved it! I hope you enjoyed it. Review please?**


End file.
